Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Men Should Not Go Into Medicine

Men, you should not be doctors. If you're a male medical student, start thinking about changing course and go work for SnapChat instead. If you're already a practicing male physician, consider early retirement and start taking Bob Ross art classes. Your patients will thank you. Your hospital administrator will thank you. Your country will thank you. That is because a new paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine has shown that female physicians demonstrate statistically better outcomes than men.

The study out of the Harvard School of Public Health examined 1.5 million Medicare patients from 2011-2014. They found that the patients treated by female internists had lower mortality rates, 11.07% vs 11.49%. Their 30 day readmission rates were also lower, 15.02% vs 15.57%. If male internists had the same mortality rates for their patients as women, 32,000 lives would be saved in this country each year.

How to explain this discrepancy in outcomes? There are a few clues. The female doctors in the study, out of a total of 58,344 physicians examined, tended to be younger, 42.8 years old vs 47.8 years for men.They are more likely to have trained in osteopathic medicine and to have taken care of fewer patients.

But studies have also shown that male and female doctors conduct their practices differently. According to Dr. Ashish Jha, one of the coauthors of the study, "There is data out there that women practice evidence-based medicine, and they tend to stick more closely to clinical guidelines."

There you go. We men are like bulls in a china shop, running amok through the hospital corridors, cavalierly treating our patients based on nothing but a whim. Meanwhile our cerebral female colleagues follow the edicts from the ivory towers up high, following every new algorithm and wisdom they deign to pass down to us ignorant medical masses. The female doctors will even work for less money, earning on average $51,000 less per year than men. We male doctors should just do all our patients a favor and quit right now.

But of course we need to take these results with a large grain of salt. If male doctors truly produced worse outcomes for their patients, I would think that would have become readily apparent. Hospital administrators and state medical boards would long ago have disciplined doctors for not producing similar results, otherwise known as community standards, as their female colleagues.

Therefore this is just another shoddy medical study that is trying too hard to be politically correct to impress the liberal media and government organizations. What would be truly impressive would be a study that showed the productivity gains by hiring more male physicians over women. But that would probably never pass the scrutiny of the academic editors who control the medical journals.

1 comment:

Can you imagine a study that shows Male Surgeons have better outcomes than Female? Since this study was linked to hospitalists can you imagine the outcry? I've read the study they say it cannot be proven the differences were based on sex alone but have heavy implications. There was another study that showed Surgeons and Anesthesiologists are conservative while psych, ID, and peds are liberal. This is because they are more sensitive doctors. Great the accepting left is accepting of everyone but themselves again. So really unless you are a liberal female you have no place in medicine.